For those with questions about the mental acuity of the leading 2024 presidential candidates, or those involved in stoking the increasingly heated online spin around such questions, Saturday night was a bonanza.
President Biden appeared to “freeze,” as the New York Post put it, as he walked offstage at a fundraising appearance in downtown Los Angeles with former President Obama and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
“A scene straight out of 'Weekend at Bernie's,'” Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign and chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee, told The Times.
Biden's campaign and its allies accused the Post and others who circulated the “freeze” meme of misrepresenting the images. In other cases they went further and attacked the media and Republicans for sharing manipulated videos of the president.
“Rupert Murdoch's sad little Super Pac, the New York Post, has once again disrespected its readers and itself by pretending that the president receiving a crowd applauding for a few seconds is somehow wrong.” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said on X.
That same night, former President Trump asked his 2024 rival to take a “cognitive test,” claiming he had “taken” one himself while in office, and then got the name of the doctor who administered it wrong. . “Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson? Trump said, referring to Dr. Ronny Jackson, who is now a congressman from Texas.
Next week's debate, which will be broadcast on CNN and simultaneously on other networks, will be one of the few times when the public will be able to see the candidates side by side, unfiltered, for an extended period. The voters will be able to judge for themselves the vitality, energy and mental acuity of each man.
Peter Reed, director of the Sanford Center on Aging at the University of Nevada Reno, said it's not possible to know a person's mental acuity based on video clips. Cognitive and physical abilities vary from person to person, and there's no way to know just by watching a five-second clip, he added.
“For me, as a professional, it would be extremely difficult to watch any of the presidential candidates on television or see anything posted on social media and make an accurate assessment of their capabilities. I just don't think that's possible,” Reed said. “And frankly, any non-professional who is diagnosing any of these people is wrong.”
President Biden arrives on stage at Saturday night's fundraising event in Los Angeles with former President Obama.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
This potential turning point in the campaign, one of two scheduled debates between men, comes as candidates and their allies seize video moments of alleged or apparent slip-ups and circulate them to generate maximum outrage on TikTok, X and Instagram. In a race between an 81-year-old incumbent and a 78-year-old challenger, age has become a weapon.
Just days before the fundraiser in Los Angeles, critics claimed that a video showed Biden wandering during a G-7 summit. (“Meanderer in chief,” said the New York Post.) In fact, he was coming over to greet some French paratroopers.
The political combat via video footage draws further attention to the fact that most Americans say they are dissatisfied with the major parties' presidential candidates, in part because they are both so old.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll from February found that 59% of Americans think both Biden and Trump are too old to serve. Biden consistently fares worse than Trump on the age issue: 63% of voters said they had little or no confidence in his mental ability to serve as president, compared to 57% who thought the same about Trump, according to a March poll. of the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
In the debate, “Biden has to be direct and blunt and take it in a way that Trump can't, which is acknowledge it,” Democratic strategist Doug Herman said in an interview. “Trump doesn't recognize his age. Biden can and must. He should take it lightly. He should refer to it in a humorous and non-defensive way, and if he does, he will win this debate hands down.”
Amy Pason, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada Reno, said evaluating candidates' abilities in the context of age is not new in a presidential election. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was examined in 2016 for a cough. Trump responded by posting a doctor's note declaring him “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
In the 1940s, President Franklin Roosevelt projected a healthy personality, usually appearing seated behind tables to hide the fact that he used a wheelchair as a result of polio. In the first televised debate in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, many who watched thought that the young, affable, freshly made-up Kennedy won, while those who listened on the radio believed that Nixon, with strong words and which sounded decisive, won.
“All these kinds of images and presenting yourself as someone who is healthy, vigorous, capable of doing the things that we think you need to do as president are always … a place that campaigns naturally go to as an attack on their rights. opponent,” Pason said.
Democrats have been quick to attack Trump's repeated verbal gaffes and what they say is his relative incoherence when it comes to talking about politics. They have highlighted that Trump confused former president Jimmy Carter with tennis legend Jimmy Connors.
Progressive activist Brian Tyler Cohen invoked the mantra of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who told a reporter: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the area with m…
Former President Trump at last week's rally in Detroit.
(Carlos Osorio/Associated Press)
Cohen's point is that Democrats should not stand by while Republicans spread misleading clips of Biden, whom Cohen interviewed on his YouTube channel. Cohen's social media feed is filled with videos of Trump looking bewildered or needing help offstage, although from another angle, it's clear that Trump is shaking hands with one of his children. For his part, Cohen says Democrats must fight fire with fire.
“Here's a photo of Trump having to hold someone's hand to guide him off stage,” Cohen wrote on X. “I'm sure this will get as much coverage as the newspaper [“Biden old”] the story sets.”
Cohen attended the Los Angeles fundraiser and published strong denunciations against the New York Post and others who said Biden froze. He has said it is important for Democrats not to “give ground” when it comes to a conversation about candidates' mental fitness.
“The Republican Party has a mandate to make this election a referendum on age as a distraction from whatever else is more important,” Cohen said in an interview.
He said “Republicans know” that stories about Biden’s accomplishments aren’t going to “resist the appeal of some story about an alleged physical gaffe on stage.”
The Biden campaign has accounts on TikTok, Instagram and X, where staff highlight Trump videos that sound incoherent or confuse basic policy concepts.
The accounts have featured videos of Trump saying that if he were elected “it will be a bloodbath” and regularly highlighted Trump's unwillingness to protect NATO allies, among other issues. The Republican National Committee runs similar accountsthat videos have surfaced of Biden falling onto the stage at an event at the Air Force Academy and walking cautiously toward Marine One.
Voters can expect these accounts to consistently post content during and right after the debate.
Both candidates have been preparing. Biden has been at Camp David with his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, and others. The New York Times reported last week that Trump had been meeting with his staff and certain Republican senators for policy sessions ahead of next week's showdown.
“This debate will be a great opportunity for President Trump to highlight his strength versus Joe Biden's weakness,” Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Newsmax on Thursday.
Jim Demers, a Democratic strategist based in New Hampshire, said the debate will be a great moment for Biden to highlight the extent of Trump's legal problems and how he does not have voters' best interests in mind.
“Donald Trump couldn't get a job for almost any company in America because he couldn't pass the background check,” Demers said.
“There are people who would have liked to see two younger candidates, but that is not the case. “This race has really taken shape and voters will have to make their decisions based on reality, and the reality is that we have two candidates who are older.”
